For a cognitive neuroscience of concepts: Moving beyond the grounding issue

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2016, Pages 991-1001

  Leshinskaya, Anna ^a   Caramazza, Alfonso ^a,b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO   (Italy)

Author keywords

Concepts; Embodied cognition; Neuroimaging; Semantic memory

Indexed keywords

BRAIN; BRAIN CORTEX; COGNITION; COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE; CONCEPT FORMATION; HUMAN; KNOWLEDGE; NEUROIMAGING;

BRAIN; CEREBRAL CORTEX; COGNITION; COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE; CONCEPT FORMATION; HUMANS; KNOWLEDGE; NEUROIMAGING;

EID: 84974777396     PISSN: 10699384     EISSN: 15315320     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-015-0870-z     Document Type: Review

References (93)

1. Andres, M., Finocchiaro, C., Buiatti, M., & Piazza, M. (2015). Contribution of motor representations to action verb processing. Cognition, 134, 174–184. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.10.004
2. Aydede, M. (1999). What makes perceptual symbols perceptual? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 610–611.
3. Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617–645. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
4. Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.
5. Bedny, M., & Caramazza, A. (2011). Perception, action, and word meanings in the human brain: The case from action verbs. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1224, 81–95. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06013.x
6. Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2011). The neurobiology of semantic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(11), 527–536. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.10.001
7. Binder, J. R., Westbury, C. F., McKiernan, K. A., Possing, E. T., & Medler, D. A. (2005). Distinct brain systems for processing concrete and abstract concepts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(6), 905–917.
8. Blundo, C., Ricci, M., & Miller, L. (2006). Category-specific knowledge deficit for animals in a patient with herpes simplex encephalitis. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23(8), 1248–1268. doi:10.1080/02643290600896449
9. Breining, B., & Rapp, B. (2011). Neural distinctions between categories of abstract and concrete words: A multi-voxel pattern analysis. In Poster presented at theThird Annual Neurobiology of Language Meeting, November 10-11, 2011. Annapolis, MD, USA
10. Bright, P., Moss, H. E., Longe, O., Stamatakis, E. A., & Tyler, L. K. (2007). Conceptual structure modulates anteromedial temporal involvement in processing verbally presented object properties. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 1066–1073.
11. Buckner, R. L., & Krienen, F. M. (2013). The evolution of distributed association networks in the human brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(12), 648–665. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.09.017
12. Buxbaum, L. J., Shapiro, A. D., & Coslett, H. B. (2014). Critical brain regions for tool-related and imitative actions: A componential analysis. Brain: A Journal of Neurology. doi:10.1093/brain/awu111
13. Cappa, S. F., Perani, D., Schnur, T., Tettamanti, M., & Fazio, F. (1998). The effects of semantic category and knowledge type on lexical-semantic access: A PET study. NeuroImage, 8(4), 350–359. doi:10.1006/nimg.1998.0368
14. Caramazza, A. (1992). Is cognitive neuropsychology possible? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 4(1).
15. Caramazza, A., Anzellotti, S., Strnad, L., & Lingnau, A. (2014). Embodied cognition and mirror neurons: A critical assessment. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 37, 1–15. doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-013950
16. Caramazza, A., Hillis, A. E., Rapp, B. C., & Romani, C. (1990). The multiple semantics hypothesis: Multiple confusions? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 7(3), 161–189.
17. Caramazza, A., & Mahon, B. Z. (2006). The organization of conceptual knowledge in the brain: The future’s past and some future directions. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 23(1), 13–38.
18. Caramazza, A., & Shelton, J. R. (1998). Domain-specific knowledge systems in the brain the animate-inanimate distinction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10(1), 1–34.
19. Chatterjee, A. (2010). Disembodying cognition. Language and Cognition, 2(1), 79–116.
20. Chierchia, G. (2006). Formal semantics. In Encyclopedia of language & linguistics. Elsevier.
21. De Lange, F. P., Spronk, M., Willems, R. M., Toni, I., & Bekkering, H. (2008). Complementary systems for understanding action intentions. Current Biology, 18(6), 454–457. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.02.057
22. Fedorenko, E., Duncan, J., & Kanwisher, N. (2013). Broad domain generality in focal regions of frontal and parietal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(41), 16616–16621. doi:10.1073/pnas.1315235110
23. Goldberg, R. F., Perfetti, C. A., Fiez, J. A., & Schneider, W. (2007). Selective retrieval of abstract semantic knowledge in left prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 27(14), 3790–3798.
24. Goldberg, R. F., Perfetti, C. A., & Schneider, W. (2006). Perceptual knowledge retrieval activates sensory brain regions. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(18), 4917–4921. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5389-05.2006
25. Grill-Spector, K., & Malach, R. (2001). fMR-adaptation: A tool for studying the functional properties of human cortical neurons. Acta Psychologica, 107(1-3), 293–321. doi:10.1016/S0001-6918(01)00019-1
26. Hamilton, A. F. D. C., & Grafton, S. T. (2006). Goal representation in human anterior intraparietal sulcus. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(4), 1133–1137. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4551-05.2006
27. Hauk, O., Davis, M. H., Kherif, F., & Pulvermüller, F. (2008). Imagery or meaning? Evidence for a semantic origin of category-specific brain activity in metabolic imaging. European Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 1856–1866.
28. Hauk, O., Johnsrude, I., & Pulvermüller, F. (2004). Somatotopic representation of action words in human motor and premotor cortex. Neuron, 41(2), 301–307.
29. Haxby, J. V., Gobbini, M. I., & Furey, M. L. (2001). Distributed and overlapping representations of faces and objects in ventral temporal cortex. Science, 293, 2425–2430.
30. Hesse, M. D., Sparing, R., & Fink, G. R. (2009). End or means–the “what” and “how” of observed intentional actions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(4), 776–790. doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21058
31. Hillis, A. E., & Caramazza, A. (1991). Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 114(5), 2081–2094.
32. Hillis, A. E., & Caramazza, A. (1995). Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying visual and semantic processing: Implications from optic aphasia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7(4), 457–478.
33. Hodges, J. R. (1992). Semantic dementia: Progressive fluent aphasia with temporal lobe atrophy. Brain, 1783–1806. doi:10.1007/s12031-011-9586-3
34. Jackendoff, R. (1987). On beyond Zebra: The relation of linguistic and visual information. Cognition, 26(2), 89–114. doi:10.1007/BF02728420
35. Jastorff, J., Begliomini, C., Fabbri-Destro, M., Rizzolatti, G., & Orban, G. A. (2010). Coding observed motor acts: Different organizational principles in the parietal and premotor cortex of humans. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104(1), 128–140. doi:10.1152/jn.00254.2010
36. Kable, J. W., Kan, I. P., Wilson, A., Thompson-Schill, S. L., & Chatterjee, A. (2005). Conceptual representations of action in the lateral temporal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(12), 1855–1870. doi:10.1162/089892905775008625
37. Kable, J. W., Lease-Spellmeyer, J., & Chatterjee, A. (2002). Neural substrates of action event knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(5), 795–805. doi:10.1162/08989290260138681
38. Kellenbach, M. L., Brett, M., & Patterson, K. (2001). Large, colorful, or noisy? Attribute- and modality-specific activations during retrieval of perceptual attribute knowledge. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 1(3), 207–221.
39. Kellenbach, M. L., Brett, M., & Patterson, K. (2003). Actions speak louder than functions: The importance of manipulability and action in tool representation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30–46.
40. Koster-Hale, J., Bedny, M., & Saxe, R. (2014). Thinking about seeing: Perceptual sources of knowledge are encoded in the theory of mind brain regions of sighted and blind adults. Cognition, 133(1), 65–78. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2014.04.006
41. Koster-Hale, J., Saxe, R., Dungan, J., & Young, L. L. (2013). Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(14), 8437–8439. doi:10.1073/pnas.1207992110/-/DCSupplemental.www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1207992110
42. Kriegeskorte, N., Goebel, R., & Bandettini, P. (2006). Information-based functional brain mapping. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(10), 3863–3868. doi:10.1073/pnas.0600244103
43. Laiacona, M., Capitani, E., & Barbarotto, R. (1997). Semantic category dissociations: A longitudinal study of two cases. Riabilitazione, 3, 441–461.
44. Lambon-Ralph, M. A., Howard, D., Nightingale, G., & Ellis, A. (1998). Are living and non-living category-specific deficits causally linked to impaired perceptual or associative knowledge? Evidence from a category-specific double dissociation. Neurocase, 4(4), 311–338. doi:10.1080/13554799808410630
45. Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. R. (1988). Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
46. Leshinskaya, A., & Caramazza, A. (2014a). Nonmotor aspects of action concepts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(12), 2863–2879.
47. Leshinskaya, A., & Caramazza, A. (2014b). Organization and structure of conceptual representations. In V. Ferreira, M. Goldrick, & M. Miozzo (Eds.), Oxford handbook of language production (pp. 118–133). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
48. Leshinskaya, A., & Caramazza, A. (in press). Abstract categories of functions in anterior parietal lobe. Neuropsychologia. Doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.014
49. Luzzatti, C., & Davidoff, J. (1994). Impaired retrieval of object-colour knowledge with preserved colour naming. Neuropsychologia, 32(8), 933–950.
50. Mahon, B. Z. (2014). What is embodied about cognition? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. doi:10.1080/23273798.2014.987791
51. Mahon, B. Z., & Caramazza, A. (2008). A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology – Paris, 102, 59–70. doi:10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004
52. Mahon, B. Z., & Caramazza, A. (2011). What drives the organization of object knowledge in the brain? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(3), 97–103. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2011.01.004
53. Martin, A. (2007). The representation of object concepts in the brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 25–45. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190143
54. Martin, A., & Chao, L. L. (2001). Semantic memory and the brain: Structure and process. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 11, 194–201.
55. Martin, A., Haxby, J. V., Lalonde, F. M., Wiggs, C. L., Lalonde, F. M., & Ungerleider, L. G. (1995). Discrete cortical regions associated with knowledge of color and knowledge of action. Science, 270(5233), 102–105.
56. McRae, K., & Jones, M. (2013). Semantic memory. In D. Reisberg (Ed.), Oxford handbook of cognitive psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
57. Meteyard, L., Cuadrado, S. R., Bahrami, B., & Vigliocco, G. (2012). Coming of age: A review of embodiment and the neuroscience of semantics. Cortex; A Journal Devoted to the Study of the Nervous System and Behavior, 48(7), 788–804. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2010.11.002
58. Miceli, G., Fouch, E., Capasso, R., Shelton, J. R., Tomaiuolo, F., & Caramazza, A. (2001). The dissociation of color from form and function knowledge. Nature Neuroscience, 4(6), 662–667. doi:10.1038/88497
59. Mitchell, J. P., Heatherton, T. F., & Macrae, C. N. (2002). Distinct neural systems subserve person and object knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(23), 15238–15243. doi:10.1073/pnas.232395699
60. Mur, M., Bandettini, P. A., & Kriegeskorte, N. (2009). Revealing representational content with pattern-information fMRI–an introductory guide. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4, 101–109.
61. Newman-Norlund, R., van Schie, H. T., van Hoek, M. E. C., Cuijpers, R. H., & Bekkering, H. (2010). The role of inferior frontal and parietal areas in differentiating meaningful and meaningless object-directed actions. Brain Research, 1315, 63–74. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2009.11.065
62. Noppeney, U., & Price, C. J. (2002). Retrieval of visual, auditory, and abstract semantics. NeuroImage, 15(4), 917–926. doi:10.1006/nimg.2001.1016
63. Ochipa, C., Rothi, L. J. G., & Heilman, K. M. (1989). Ideational apraxia: A deficit in tool selection and use. Annals of Neurology, 25, 190–193.
64. Oosterhof, N. N., Tipper, S. P., & Downing, P. E. (2013). Crossmodal and action-specific: Neuroimaging the human mirror neuron system. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1–8. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.04.012
65. Patterson, K., Nestor, P. J., & Rogers, T. T. (2007). Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(December), 976–989. doi:10.1038/nrn2277
66. Peeters, R., Rizzolatti, G., & Orban, G. A. (2013). Functional properties of the left parietal tool use region. NeuroImage, 78, 83–93. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.04.023
67. Peeters, R., Simone, L., Nelissen, K., Fabbri-Destro, M., Vanduffel, W., Rizzolatti, G., & Orban, G. A. (2009). The representation of tool use in humans and monkeys: Common and uniquely human features. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(37), 11523–11539. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2040-09.2009
68. Phillips, J. A., Noppeney, U., Humphreys, G. W., & Price, C. J. (2002). Can segregation within the semantic system account for category-specific deficits? Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 125(9), 2067–2080.
69. Poldrack, R. A. (2006). Can cognitive processes be inferred from neuroimaging data? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(2), 59–63. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.12.004
70. Pulvermüller, F., & Fadiga, L. (2010). Active perception: sensorimotor circuits as a cortical basis for language. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(5), 351–360. doi:10.1038/nrn2811
71. Pulvermüller, F., Hauk, O., Nikulin, V. V., & Ilmoniemi, R. J. (2005). Functional links between motor and language systems. The European Journal of Neuroscience, 21(3), 793–797. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2005.03900.x
72. Rodríguez-Ferreiro, J., Gennari, S. P., Davies, R., & Cuetos, F. (2011). Neural correlates of abstract verb processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(1), 106–118. doi:10.1162/jocn.2010.21414
73. Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2003). People thinking about thinking people: The role of the temporo-parietal junction in “theory of mind”. NeuroImage, 19, 1835–1842. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00230-1
74. Shallice, T. (1988). From neuropsychology to mental structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
75. Shepard, R., & Cooper, L. (1992). Representation of colors in the blind, color-blind, and normally sighted. Psychological Science, 3(2), 97–104.
76. Simmons, W. K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Pictures of appetizing foods activate gustatory cortices for taste and reward. Cerebral Cortex, 15(10), 1602–1608. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi038
77. Simmons, W. K., Ramjee, V., Beauchamp, M. S., McRae, K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2007). A common neural substrate for perceiving and knowing about color. Neuropsychologia, 45(12), 2802–2810. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.05.002
78. Skipper, L. M., & Olson, I. R. (2013). Connectivity of cortical networks supporting social and nonsocial, abstract and concrete conceptual knowledge. In Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, 13-16 April 2013. San Francisco.
79. Smith, E. E., & Medin, D. L. (1981). Categories and concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
80. Spunt, R. P., & Adolphs, R. (2014). Validating the why/how contrast for functional MRI studies of theory of mind. NeuroImage, 99, 301–311. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.05.023
81. Spunt, R. P., & Lieberman, M. D. (2012). Dissociating modality-specific and supramodal neural systems for action understanding. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(10), 3575–3583. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5715-11.2012
82. Spunt, R. P., Satpute, A. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2011). Dissociable neural systems support retrieval of how and why action knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(1), 63–74. doi:10.1177/0956797610386618
83. Stasenko, A., Garcea, F. E., Dombovy, M., & Mahon, B. Z. (2014). When concepts lose their color: A case of object-color knowledge impairment. Cortex, 58, 217–238. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2014.05.013
84. Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2003). Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: Inferring “how” from “where”. Neuropsychologia, 41, 280–292.
85. Tranel, D., Kemmerer, D., Adolphs, R., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (2003). Neural correlates of conceptual knowledge for actions. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 20(3), 409–432. doi:10.1080/02643290244000248
86. Vandenbulcke, M., Peeters, R., Fannes, K., & Vandenberghe, R. (2006). Knowledge of visual attributes in the right hemisphere. Nature Neuroscience, 9(7), 964–970. doi:10.1038/nn1721
87. Warrington, E. K. (1975). The Selective impairment of semantic memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27, 635–657. doi:10.1080/14640747508400525
88. Warrington, E. K., & Shallice, T. (1984). Category-specific semantic impairments. Brain, 107, 829–854. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.11.018
89. Watson, C. E., & Chatterjee, A. (2011). The functional neuroanatomy of actions. Neurology, 76(16), 1428–1434. doi:10.1212/WNL.0b013e3182166e2c
90. Wheatley, T., Weisberg, J., Beauchamp, M. S., & Martin, A. (2005). Automatic priming of semantically related words reduces activity in the fusiform gyrus. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(12), 1871–1885. doi:10.1162/089892905775008689
91. Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Simmons, W. K., Martin, A., & Barsalou, L. W. (2013). Contextual processing of abstract concepts reveals neural representations of non-linguistic semantic content. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25, 920--935.
92. Yee, E., Chrysikou, E. G., Hoffman, E., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2013). Manual experience shapes object representations. Psychological Science, 24(6), 909–919. doi:10.1177/0956797612464658
93. Young, L., & Saxe, R. (2009). An FMRI investigation of spontaneous mental state inference for moral judgment. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(7), 1396–1405. doi:10.1162/jocn.2009.21137